Fission Barriers of Neutron-rich and Superheavy Nuclei calculated ...

ut it is still the largest triaxiality shift that we have found, and really too
large to be neglected. One is thus forced to the conclusion that while in most
cases triaxiality can reasonably be neglected, as far as barriers are concerned,
there will be isolated cases where this is not possible. The situation is most
unsatisfactory, since such cases can only be identified by first performing the
full triaxial calculation, and doing this for the nearly 2000 nuclei considered
here would be prohibitively time-consuming. It seems that the best that one
can do at the present time is to proceed as we have done here, neglecting
triaxiality, and bear in mind that a few of our barriers, including some low
enough to be relevant to the r-process, will be considerably overestimated
because of this approximation. However, the barriers of our proton-deficient
nuclei in the vicinity of N = 184 will remain much higher than previously
believed.
Acknowledgements
We are indebted to B. Lorazo of the Computing Centre of the Université
de Montréal for his help in facilitating our computations, and to M. Farine
for calculating the surface properties of the SkSC forces. P. Möller is thanked
for valuable communications. J. M. P. acknowledges the financial support of
the FNRS (Belgium) that made possible an extended visit to the Université
Libre de Bruxelles, and is grateful for the hospitality extended to him at the
Institut d’Astronomie et d’Astrophysique by Prof. M. Arnould. M. R. is a
Research Associate of the FNRS.
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